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  13  <h1>
  14      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  15
  16  </h1>
  17
  18 </div>
  19
  20
  21     <h3>Entries tagged "bitcoin".</h3>
  22
  23     <div class="entry">
  24       <div class="title">
  25         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Some_thoughts_on_BitCoins.html">Some thoughts on BitCoins</a>
  26       </div>
  27       <div class="date">
  28         11th December 2010
  29       </div>
  30       <div class="body">
  31         <p>As I continue to explore
  32 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>, I've starting to wonder
  33 what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws
  34 and regulations here in Norway.  Here are some random notes.</p>
  35
  36 <p>One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are
  37 verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction
  38 is known to everyone.  This means that if a BitCoin address has been
  39 published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is
  40 possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to
  41 that address.  There is even a web service to look at the details for
  42 all transactions.  There I can see that my address
  43 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a>
  44 have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the
  45 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3">1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3</a>
  46 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address
  47 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt">1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt</A>
  48 of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far.  Thank you to each and
  49 every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The
  50 fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given
  51 address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to
  52 generate and hand out a new address for each transaction.  I'm told
  53 there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or
  54 organisation without the person or organisation revealing it
  55 themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.</p>
  56
  57 <p>In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and
  58 regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border
  59 without declaring it.  There are money laundering, tax and accounting
  60 laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin.
  61 If the Skolelinux foundation
  62 (<a href="http://linuxiskolen.no/slxdebianlabs/donations.html">SLX
  63 Debian Labs</a>) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to
  64 normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted?
  65 Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or
  66 not, should everything or nothing be declared?  What exchange rate
  67 should be used when calculating taxes?  Would receivers have to pay
  68 income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in
  69 BitCoin?  I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.</p>
  70
  71 <p>For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and
  72 accepted by a lot of users.  It must be possible to get easy access to
  73 the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be
  74 easy to spend it.  At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get
  75 access to, but there are very few places to spend it.  I am not really
  76 a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin,
  77 so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins.  I
  78 would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs
  79 and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time
  80 if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby
  81 to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular.  I'm sure they
  82 will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which
  83 probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I
  84 believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming
  85 currencies.</p>
  86
  87 <p>The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is
  88 CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is
  89 competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles
  90 to see which one get the next lump of cash).  The "winner" get 50
  91 BitCoin when this happen.  Yesterday I came across the obvious way to
  92 join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins,
  93 by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines
  94 and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50
  95 BitCoins.  Check out
  96 <a href="http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/bitcoin-pool/">BitCoin Pool</a>
  97 if this sounds interesting.  I have not had time to try to set up a
  98 machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones
  99 own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining
 100 yet.</p>
 101
 102 <p>Update 2010-12-15: Found an <a
 103 href="http://inertia.posterous.com/reply-to-the-underground-economist-why-bitcoi">interesting
 104 criticism</a> of bitcoin.  Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought
 105 it was interesting to read.  The arguments presented seem to be
 106 equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.</p>
 107
 108       </div>
 109       <div class="tags">
 110
 111
 112         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 113
 114
 115       </div>
 116     </div>
 117     <div class="padding"></div>
 118
 119     <div class="entry">
 120       <div class="title">
 121         <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">Now accepting bitcoins - anonymous and distributed p2p crypto-money</a>
 122       </div>
 123       <div class="date">
 124         10th December 2010
 125       </div>
 126       <div class="body">
 127         <p>With this weeks lawless
 128 <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html">governmental
 129 attacks</a> on Wikileak and
 130 <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/06/war_on_speech">free
 131 speech</a>, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can
 132 not be trusted to handle money transactions.
 133 A blog post from
 134 <a href="http://webmink.com/2010/12/06/now-accepting-bitcoin/">Simon
 135 Phipps on bitcoin</a> reminded me about a project that a friend of
 136 mine mentioned earlier.  I decided to follow Simon's example, and get
 137 involved with <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">BitCoin</a>.  I got
 138 some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me
 139 some bitcoins to get started.  I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon
 140 for helping me remember BitCoin.</p>
 141
 142 <p>So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder?  It is a digital
 143 crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer
 144 networks.  It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central
 145 control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments
 146 and companies alike to block donations and other transactions.  The
 147 source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9
 148 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command
 149 line client builds just fine.  Hopefully Jonas
 150 <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/578157">will get the package into
 151 Debian</a> soon.</p>
 152
 153 <p>Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR.
 154 There are <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/trade">companies accepting
 155 bitcoins</a> when selling services and goods, and there are even
 156 currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided.  There
 157 are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising.  If you
 158 want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare,
 159 you can even get
 160 <a href="https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/">some for free</a> (0.05
 161 bitcoin at the time of writing).  Use
 162 <a href="http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/">BitcoinWatch</a> to keep an eye
 163 on the current exchange rates.</p>
 164
 165 <p>As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my
 166 machines.  If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin
 167 donations to the address
 168 <b>15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</b>.  Thank you!</p>
 169
 170       </div>
 171       <div class="tags">
 172
 173
 174         Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/personvern">personvern</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/sikkerhet">sikkerhet</a>.
 175
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